The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a bitter and bloody Civil War fought over one underlying factor: slavery. Though many, including President Abraham Lincoln himself, claimed this war was to ‘protect the union’, the south clearly wanted slaves, and opposed anyone who could take their slaves away. To all, this contention for slavery brought up questions as to what American liberty and freedom really meant in relation to African Americans, questions that yielded an incredibly wide array of answers within the country. What caused this array of answers differed with the race, sex, socioeconomic demographic that Americans were a part of. These perspectives on liberty and freedom in relation to African Americans, though different because
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With Abraham Lincoln assassinated, Andrew Johnson stepped into the presidency. The North Carolinian Johnson was an unconscious racist, stating in one of his earlier speeches that “he wished that ‘every head of family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off his family.’” His attitude allowed the carrying out of the atrocious hardships faced by freed post-war African Americans. These hardships were stemmed on the basis of a racist America, half of which had just lost a war over slavery and had seen their national identity become legally banned. But the government had let African Americans down from the start, and with Johnson’s failure to do everything in his power to build on and further along equal rights for African Americans, there would forever be racist sentiment intertwined with the history of this country. This idleness enacted the abhorrent treatment of African Americans in the post-war era. Abhorring treatment of African Americans post-war actually started within the government with the passing of the Black Codes, which “subject[ed] former slaves to a variety of special regulations and restrictions on their freedom...To Radicals, the Black Codes looked suspiciously like slavery under a new guise.” Different rules and regulations for supposedly equal human beings revealed that there was inequality still. In an attempt to ‘fix’ this inequality, Congress did pass the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but this was no longer a legislative problem, as it was still a part of America’s national identity. This inequality embedded in America’s national identity showed itself most violently with the Ku Klux Klan, a group “bent on restoring white supremacy by intimidating blacks
With Abraham Lincoln assassinated, Andrew Johnson stepped into the presidency. The North Carolinian Johnson was an unconscious racist, stating in one of his earlier speeches that “he wished that ‘every head of family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off his family.’” His attitude allowed the carrying out of the atrocious hardships faced by freed post-war African Americans. These hardships were stemmed on the basis of a racist America, half of which had just lost a war over slavery and had seen their national identity become legally banned. But the government had let African Americans down from the start, and with Johnson’s failure to do everything in his power to build on and further along equal rights for African Americans, there would forever be racist sentiment intertwined with the history of this country. This idleness enacted the abhorrent treatment of African Americans in the post-war era. Abhorring treatment of African Americans post-war actually started within the government with the passing of the Black Codes, which “subject[ed] former slaves to a variety of special regulations and restrictions on their freedom...To Radicals, the Black Codes looked suspiciously like slavery under a new guise.” Different rules and regulations for supposedly equal human beings revealed that there was inequality still. In an attempt to ‘fix’ this inequality, Congress did pass the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but this was no longer a legislative problem, as it was still a part of America’s national identity. This inequality embedded in America’s national identity showed itself most violently with the Ku Klux Klan, a group “bent on restoring white supremacy by intimidating blacks